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What unites Cervantes’s “Don Quixote” and Dostoevsky’s “Crime and Punishment”? Both are centered on the perception of reality through literature. As translator Oliver Ready argues, Raskolnikov, the anti-hero of “Crime and Punishment,” is most at home in the world of words, whether books, newspapers or letters from acquaintances and relatives that he analyses like a literary critic or a detective. He is not just a student and a murderer – he is a reader and a writer, whose literary debut, an article about crime, is one of the great missing clues in the novel.

The very fact that Raskolnikov is a man of letters is what makes it so important to get as close to the original as a translation allows. Out this year in Penguin Classics, Oliver Ready’s new translation of Dostoevsky’s “Crime and Punishment” aims to preserve the original's troubled and polyphonic narrative, and the varying language and vocabulary of its different characters. In his translation, Ready, a research fellow in Rus…

At the beginning of the 20th century, there were more people reading Tolstoy in translation than any other writer. That this was an extraordinary phenomenon becomes clear from reading an unsigned review of 13 new volumes of Tolstoy translations published in Britain’s liveliest literary periodical, the Saturday Review, in 1905. “Twenty years ago Tolstoy was hardly known outside Russia”, it begins. “We remember mentioning his existence to an American novelist of first rank, a great admirer of Turgenev, who did not seem inclined to believe that people would soon come to recognise the greater power of Tolstoy. Who has not heard of Tolstoy now?”

The novelist in question is undoubtedly Henry James, a friend and well-known admirer of Ivan Turgenev, the first leading Russian writer to be widely translated and recognised abroad. The critic is almost certainly James’s protégé HG Wells, one of a number of brilliant young writers drafted in to shake up the Saturday Review by its new editor in the …

Only recently, with the publication of Noël Alexandre’s major monograph The Unknown Modigliani which reproduces 376 works on paper [some double-sided], given by Modigliani to his father, Paul Alexandre, has the all-important presence of the great Russian poet Anna Akhmatova in Modigliani’s art, began to be recognized and understood. Akhmatova’s poetic genius; charismatic beauty and elongated, sensual body struck a unique chord with Modigliani. And influenced the course of his art, at a critical juncture in his development. Aged seventeen, he had written to his artist friend Oscar Ghilia: Believe me, only work that has gone through the whole process of gestation is fit to be expressed and translated by style…… It is our duty never to be consumed by the sacrificial fire. Your real duty is to save your dream. Beauty too has some painful duties; these produce however, the noblest efforts of the soul. Six years later, in a small sketchbook he wrote the words reproduced above. What I am searchin…

Henry James once said that "really, universally, human relations stop nowhere," and that the exquisite problem of the writer is to draw the circle "within which they shall happily appear to do so". James would never have nominated War and Peace – he famously thought it a "loose baggy monster" – but Tolstoy's novel is surely the greatest attempt in the history of the genre to represent and embody the branching infinity of human relations of which James spoke. And there is no better example of that challenge than the way in which Tolstoy's project kept growing. He wrote War and Peace between 1863 and 1868, and intended, at first, to write a domestic chronicle in the manner of Trollope (whom Tolstoy, with a few qualifications, admired). The novel would be set in 1856, and concern an aristocratic revolutionary and his return from exile in Siberia. It would be called, improbably, All's Well That Ends Well. But in order to explain the atmosphere of …

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In conversations with Svetlana Alexievich, it quickly becomes apparent that she is more comfortable listening than she is talking. That’s hardly surprising: the Belarusian writer has spent decades in listening mode. Alexievich, now 69, put in thousands of hours with her tape recorder across the lands of the former Soviet Union, collecting and collating stories from ordinary people. She wove those tales into elegant books of such power and insight, that in 2015 she received the Nobel prize for literature.

In today’s Russia, Alexievich’s work is a Rorschach test for political beliefs: among the beleaguered, liberal opposition, she is frequently seen as the conscience of the nation, a uniquely incisive commentator on the disappointments and complexities of the post-Soviet condition. Mainstream opinion sees her as a turncoat whose books degrade Russia and Russians.

When I meet her in a cosy basement café in her home city of Minsk, the entrance nestled in an amphitheatre of imposing, late-So…

History is a battleground, perennially fought over, endlessly contested. Nowhere does this aphorism hold true more than in Russia. A majority of Russians recently voted Joseph Stalin the “most outstanding person” in world history (followed, naturally, by current President Vladimir Putin). No longer the monster of the gulags and purges that killed millions, Stalin now looms in the national consciousness as the giant who defeated the Nazis in World War II. Meanwhile, not only has Russia annexed Crimea and destabilized Ukraine’s eastern regions, its military adventurism has also extended to Syria. Putin, who once described the collapse of the USSR as “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe” of the twentieth century, looks determined to avenge the humiliations of Russia’s post-Soviet implosion. Integral to this endeavor is not just to flex the country’s geopolitical might in the present but to re-write its past.

It is this point that makes the historiography of the USSR—a subject worthy of …

One of the most revealing episodes in J. A. E. Curtis’s Mikhail Bulgakov, in the Reaktion Books Critical Lives series, itself concerns the writing of a “critical life”. In 1932–3, Bulgakov, a man devoted to the theatre, wrote a brief novelized biography of Molière. The book was commissioned for the hallowed Russian series Lives of Remarkable People, but like much of Bulgakov’s work from the 1920s and 30s, it would not see the light of day until decades after his death in 1940. As usual, the Soviet author had taken a thoroughly un-Soviet approach to the topic, presenting Molière as an individual genius – rather than as a product of his era and class – and fitting the facts of his life into a fictional frame. In his rejection, the series editor explained Bulgakov’s error: “You have placed between Molière and the reader some sort of imaginary storyteller. If, instead of this casual young man in an old-fashioned coat, who from time to time lights or puts out the candles, you had given us …